Film after film : Or, what became of 21st-ecntury cinema? / J. Hoberman

A post-photographic cinema. The myth of "the myth of total cinema" -- The matrix: "a prison for your mind" -- The new realness -- Quid est veritas: the reality of unspeakable suffering -- Social network -- Postscript: total cinema redux -- A chronicle of the Bush years. 2001: after September 11 -- 2002: the war on terror begins -- 2003: invading Iraq -- 2004: Bush's victory -- 2005: looking for the Muslim world -- 2006: September 11, the anniversary -- 2007: what was Iraq and where? -- 2008: the election -- Notes toward a syllabus. In praise of love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) -- Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001) -- Avant-garde goes digital: Corpus callosum, Cotton Candy, and Razzle Dazzle -- Russian ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2002) -- Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) -- Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2002) -- Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) -- The world (Jia Zhangke, 2004) -- Battle in heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005) -- The death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) -- Day night day night (Julia Loktev, 2006) -- Southland tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) -- Inland empire (David Lynch, 2006) -- Between darkness and light (after William Blake) (Douglas Gordon, 1997/2006) -- LOL (Joe Swanberg, 2006) -- Flight of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) -- Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) -- Opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics (August 8, 2008) -- Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010) -- The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010) -- Once upon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011).

In this sly and thought-provoking essay, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman suggests that it's possible to speak of a distinctive twenty-first century cinema, only a decade into the new millennium. The advent of a new digital technology has led to the displacement of the medium of film - and of the real, as digital image-making ends the necessity of having an actual world, let alone the need for a camera. The future history of motion pictures, Hoberman asserts, will be the history of animation. Meanwhile, the 2000 American presidential election and the trauma of 9/11 have reshaped the movies politically. The two events have combined to create a rupture in film history, perhaps presaging, as Susan Sontag forlornly predicted at the close of the century, the death of cinema, or at least cinephilia. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorist/critics like Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, expands on a much-discussed article by Hoberman from Artforum and includes considerations of global cinema's most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar, and Inception.